Who Should Read This Book

Inspiration and insights from someone that has discovered their personal Single Motivating Purpose and created a thriving business from it

Practical advice about how to be the leader of a team aligned behind a common mission and purpose.

Why We Read This Book

When this book first came out, our impression was that it wouldn’t really apply to our business since it was about a large company with employees that shipped a physical product.

Boy were we wrong! However, reading Delivering Happiness now, two years later, is very timely.

You see, for years we’ve assumed we’d never grow our businesses beyond working at home with a handful of virtual employees. We wanted to preserve a certain lifestyle. Having an office with lots of employees seemed like hassle.

Well, that has totally changed now. Lately we feel driven to take our Single Motivating Purpose to as many people as we can. We want to our company to leave a legacy. That’s going to require a much bigger company with 50-100 employees.

In light of that, we read Delivering Happiness to feed our vision of what it would be like to build and run that kind of business. This book definitely delivered that and much more.

Takeaways and Next Actions

If we are dedicated to the purpose of helping our audience and customers to get paid to live their purpose, we need to dedicate ourselves to making that happen for our team as well.

Your external brand is just a reflection of your internal culture. Even if we only have three employees, we need to start building the culture now.

We need a list of core values for our brand. These are the things that we stand for. They are the things that we hold to be true no matter what.

Even though we had a two-year period where we put money and other things ahead of our SMP, it is not something we need to regret. Tony had similar experiences. The lessons he learned in those moments significantly contributed to building Zappos into the company it is today.

What do you think?

What were the key insights and next actions that you took from this book? What did you like most? What didn’t you like? Share your thoughts in the comments below.